If I understand this correctly—and I realize that it's similar to the one that was moved before—what you're requesting is that within one week, every cabinet minister disclose whether they, their families or their relatives have connections. What kind of connection do you mean? Is it whether they know somebody or they volunteered once? My mother's family has seven brothers and sisters. The number of cousins I have and the number of their children is endless.
By the way, usually when you word something like this with a genuine intent, you say, “to the best of their knowledge”, but you haven't even done that. You've said “to disclose”, full stop. You're not even saying to the best of their knowledge. You're saying it will be disclosed.
You didn't even say a financial connection or financial relationship, so you're doing one of two things, in my humble opinion—although many will argue it's not humble. You're either trying to set up a scenario in which people are not going to be able to deliver this information, in which case you will then attempt to find vulnerabilities and weak spots in what they've delivered to you, or you're creating a scenario in which you know cabinet will reject this so that you can then say they refused to give you the information. In either scenario what you're doing is not being genuine. Again, that's in my opinion.
I would have thought you would have some relatively decent language in this to define what a connection is, what a relationship is. I would have thought you would use language to the effect of “to the best of my knowledge”, and I would have thought you would give more time to compile this information. It's extremely cumbersome for somebody who, perhaps, has a large family to deal with that.
I'm not a permanent member of this committee, Madam Chair. I am here substituting for somebody. I've had a great time.